In memory of Deedle
“[Y]ou will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”
―Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer,
Studies on Hysteria, 1895
Chapter One
The day after their wedding, in 1940, Flora remembered waking up feeling different, but not in the way she always thought she would or in the way that people had led her to believe that she would. People—her sisters, her mother, books, movies—had told her she would feel like an adult: fuller, more whole, more womanly, and connected to the world in a new way. Flora believed these things might happen but she had secretly hoped that she might also feel—or even suddenly be—both more intelligent and more beautiful. But none of these things were what she felt or what she was when she woke up that morning. What she felt was nearly impossible to put her finger on, but whatever the elusive feeling was, it felt like one solid thing, not a patchwork of things. It was so solid and almost tangible that she imagined she could punch it with her fist and that her fist would smart from the impact.
It was early August and she thought at first that what she was feeling was the weight of the air and the suffocation in their bedroom, but she stood up and saw that Will had opened all the windows and there was a cool cross breeze and that it was not actually hot or stuffy at all.
How thoughtful of him to open the windows, Flora decided. He must have gotten up while she was still in dreamland, as her sister Lillian called it—dead to the world, as Will called it. She thought she and Will might wake up together on their first day of being husband and wife, look at one another and smile and say something nice, like, “Hello, dear husband,” “Hello dear wife.” But he wasn’t there and it was just as well since Flora hoped this feeling would pass before she said her first married morning hello. She went to the mirror above her vanity table to see if maybe the “more beautiful” part had come true even if the other things hadn’t, but she was not surprised that she looked just the same as she had the morning before. That morning seemed a hundred years ago. Her sisters and her mother had been fussing around her at this very vanity table, telling her how beautiful the dress—worn also by Flora’s mother, Delia, on her wedding day—and her hair and her glowing face looked on this special day. Flora believed that she did look beautiful and was pleased about the whole day, which quite remarkably went off without a hitch.
Now the vanity table was already neatened back to its usual state, the way it had looked in her childhood bedroom from where it had been moved only a few weeks earlier. She had the same hairbrush and hand-mirror set, each decorated on its back with pressed flowers under now yellowed plastic. The brass handles were worn from years of gripping, but they still did their jobs well and it comforted her to see them, and the vanity, in this unfamiliar space where she now lived with her husband.